Narrative plays a prominent role in the postdigital art of Web3 and NFTs. In my book, The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press), the word “narrative” appears fifty times, from art narrative, autobiographic, biblical, community, creative, data-driven, historical, to personal narrative.
I have been
exploring visual narrative art in many of my artworks that can be seen at my
websites Mel
Alexenberg and Grandfather of NFTs and at Wikipedia. I
also created an Artiststory blog in 2007 with the 2011 post Postdigital
Narrative Art.
I partnered
with Michael Bielicky, professor of digital media art at ZKM University of Arts
and Design in Karlsruhe, in establishing the Institute for Postdigital
Narrative at ZKM in 2010. The video of my talk at the inauguration
of the Institute can be seen at Vimeo.
The
statement of the Institute’s aims are even more relevant today than they were
over a decade ago. “Mankind has always operated on narrative to explain and
understand its own existence. Our times,
in particular, call for the exploration, expression and especially, creation of
new story-telling formats.” NFTs offer
unprecedented opportunities for generating creative postdigital narratives.
NFT Honoring King Charles III
I created a three level visual narrative NFT to honor King Charles III on his acceding to the British throne. It begins from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem where more than three millennia ago angels in Jacob’s dream went up a ladder and then flew down three centuries ago into Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam where I transformed them into cyberangels and launched them from Rembrandt’s studio on a flight around the globe until they descended into the Victoria & Albert Museum in London to bring good wishes to King Charles from his mother Queen Elizabeth’s great-great grandparents Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.My
cyberangel artworks have been in the collections of these three museum. The
cyyberangels that have been asleep in the flat files of the museums for three
decades are coming alive, taking flight through virtual NFT skies from Israel
to Holland to England.
Art is a Computer Angel
This
narrative begins with the birth of cyberangels when I was listening to the
ancient Hebrew words being chanted from a handwritten Torah scroll while translating
them into English in my mind. It
described the artist Bezalel as being talented in all types of craftsmanship to
make MeLekHet MakHSheVeT” (Exodus 35:33). These
Hebrew words for “visual art” literally mean “thoughtful craft,” a feminine
term. When I transformed it into its masculine form MaLakH MakHSheV, it
became “computer angel.”
I rushed to
tell my wife Miriam that I discovered that my role as a male artist is to
create computer angels! I was equipped to create them as the head of the art
department at Pratt Institute where I taught the first course on creating art
with computers and was simultaneously research fellow at MIT Center for
Advanced Visual Studies.
Since
Rembrandt was the master at telling Bible stories with angels in his paintings,
drawings, and etchings, Miriam and I went to The Metropolitan Museum of Art to
see them up close. He created an etching of Jacob’s dream for the only book he
illustrated based upon the verse: “A ladder was standing on the ground, its top
reaching up towards heaven as angels were going up and down on it.” (Genesis
28:12) The angels in Jacob’s dream go up from the Land of Israel and go
down throughout the world heralding a message of peace: “They shall beat their
swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not
lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war anymore.” (Isaiah 2:4)
In Jerusalem,
I created a serigraph “Angels Ascending from the Land of Israel” showing
Rembrandt inspired cyberangels ascending from a satellite image of Israel. It
is in the collection of the Israel Museum.
Rembrandt
Cybererangels Fly around the Globe
My AT&T
sponsored telecommunications art event on October 4, 1989 honored Rembrandt
on the 320th anniversary of his death. I launched a digitized image
of his angel on a circumglobal flight from New York to the Rembrandt House Museum
in Amsterdam, Israel Museum in Jerusalem, University of the Arts in Tokyo,
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and back New York. After a five-hour
flight around the planet, the deconstructed angel was reconstructed at its
starting point.
When it
passed through Tokyo, it was already the morning of October 5th.
When it arrived in Los Angeles, it was still October 4th. Cyberangels can not only fly around the globe,
they can fly into tomorrow and back into yesterday. Millions throughout North
America watched the cyberangel return from its circumglobal flight over major
TV networks’ broadcasts from New York. It was featured in sixty newspapers and
the AT&T annual report.
The image in
the middle level of the NFT shows me in period garb in Rembrandt's studio in
Amsterdam welcoming a cyberangel from the Israel Museum’s Shrine of the Book
where some of the oldest Bible manuscripts are housed that contain the
narrative of angels going up and down the ladder in Jacob’s dream and sending
the Rembrandt inspired cyberangel on to the Victoria & Albert Museum in
London.
King
Charles and Victoria and Albert are Family
The official
opening by Queen Victoria of a museum for progress in art and design in 1857
was followed by her laying the foundation stone of its new building in 1899 and
naming it Victoria & Albert Museum. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are
the great-grandparents of King Charles’ mother Queen Elizabeth.
Queen Elizabeth
participated in the opening of the “World of the Bible” exhibition at V&A
in 1965 in co-operation with the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and
“The Bible in British Art” in 1997 with a poster for the exhibition showing
angels ascending and descending on a ladder. This poster joined my 1986
“Digital Homage to Rembrandt: Night Angels” computer generated serigraph in the
V&A prints and drawings collection. Both the biblical Hebrew words for
“angels” and “kings” sound the same.
King Charles
is a keen and accomplished artist who has exhibited and sold his works to
raise money for his charities and also published books on the subject. King
Charles commissioned seven major paintings of Holocaust survivors to
add to the official Royal Collection of Art in 2022. The project was part of the king’s
long-standing aim of educating future generations and ensuring that the horrors
of the Holocaust are never forgotten.
One
emotional visit to Israel occurred in 2016, when Charles travelled to Jerusalem
for the funeral of former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. While
there, he visited the grave of his grandmother, Princess Alice of Greece, who
saved Jews during the Holocaust and was honored as Righteous Among the Nations. She
is buried in Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
It seems
that the cyberangels ascended the virtual ladder from Jerusalem to Amsterdam to
London and have come back down to Jerusalem.
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